The following relates to the illumination arts, lighting arts, solid state lighting arts, and related arts.
Incandescent and halogen lamps are conventionally used as both omni-directional and directional light sources. A directional lamp is defined by the US Department of Energy in its Energy Star Eligibility Criteria for Integral LED Lamps, draft 3, as a lamp having at least 80% of its light output within a cone angle of 120 degrees (full-width at half-maximum of intensity, FWHM). They may have either broad beam patterns (flood lamps) or narrow beam patterns (e.g., spot lamps), for example having a beam intensity distribution characterized by a FWHM <20°, with some lamp standards specified for angles as small as 6-10° FWHM. Incandescent and halogen lamps combine these desirable beam characteristics with high color rendering index (CRI) to provide good light sources for the display of retail merchandise, residential and hospitality lighting, art work, etc. For commercial applications in North America, these lamps are designed to fit into a standard MR-x, PAR-x, or R-x lamp fixture, where “x” denotes the outer diameter of the fixture, in eighths of an inch (e.g. PAR38 has 4.75″ lamp diameter ˜120 mm). There is equivalent labeling nomenclature in other markets. These lamps have fast response time, output high light intensity, and have good CRI characteristics, especially for saturated red (e.g., the R9 CRI parameter), but suffer from poor efficacy and relatively short lamp life. For still higher intensities, high intensity discharge (HID) lamps are used, at the cost of reduced response time due to the need to heat the liquid and solid dose during the warm-up phase after turning on the lamp, and typically also reduced color quality, higher cost, and moderate lamp life ˜10 k-20 k hours.
Although these existing MR/PAR/R spotlight technologies provide generally acceptable performance, further enhancement in performance and/or color quality, and/or reduction in manufacturing cost, and/or increased wall plug energy efficiency, and/or increased lamp life and reliability would be desirable. Toward this end, efforts have been directed toward developing solid-state lighting technologies such as light emitting diode (LED) device technologies. The desirable characteristics of incandescent and halogen spot lamps include: color quality; color uniformity; beam control; and low acquisition cost. The undesirable characteristics include: poor efficacy; short life; excessive heat generation; and high life-cycle operating cost.
For MR/PAR/R spot light applications, LED device technologies have been less than satisfactory in replacing incandescent and halogen lamps. It has been difficult using LED device technologies to simultaneously achieve a combination of both good color and good beam control for spot lamps. LED-based narrow-beam spot lighting has been achieved using white LEDs as point light sources coupled with suitable lenses or other collimating optics. This type of LED device can be made with narrow FWHM in a lamp envelope comporting with MR/PAR/R fixture specifications. However, these lamps have CRI characteristics corresponding to that of the white LEDs, which is unsatisfactory in some applications. For example, such LED devices typically produce R9 values of less than 30, and CRI ˜80-85 (where a value of 100 is ideal) which is unacceptable for spot light applications such as product displays, theater and museum lighting, restaurant and residential lighting, and so forth.
On the other hand, LED based lighting applications other than spot lighting have successfully achieved high CRI by combining white LED devices with red LED devices that compensate for the red deficient spectrum of typical white LED devices. See, e.g., Van De Ven et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,213,940. To ensure mixing of light from the white and red LED devices, a large area diffuser is employed that encompasses the array of red and white LED devices. Lamps based on this technology have provided good CRI characteristics, but have not produced spot lighting due to large beam FWHM values, typically of order 100° or higher.
A combination of good color quality, good beam control and uniform illuminance and color in the beam has also been achieved by using a deep (or long) color-mixing cavity that provides multiple reflections of the light, or a long distance between the LED array and the diffuser plate, albeit at the cost of increased light losses due to cavity absorption, and increased lamp size.
It has also been proposed to combine these technologies. For example, Harbers et al., U.S. Publ. Appl. No. 2009/0103296 A1 discloses combining a color-mixing cavity consisting of an array of LED devices mounted on an extended planar substrate that is mounted at the small aperture end of a compound parabolic concentrator. Such designs are calculated to theoretically provide arbitrarily small beam FWHM by using a color-mixing cavity of sufficiently small aperture. For example, in the case of a PAR 38 lamp having a lamp diameter of 120 mm, it is theoretically predicted that a color-mixing cavity of 32 mm diameter coupled with a compound parabolic concentrator could provide a beam FWHM of 30°.
However, as noted in Harbers et al. the compound parabolic concentrator design tends to be tall. This could be problematic for an MR or PAR lamp which has a specified maximum length imposed by the MR/PAR/R regulatory standard to ensure compatibility with existing MR/PAR/R lamp sockets. Harbers et al. also proposed using a truncated compound parabolic concentrator having a truncated length in place of the simulated compound parabolic reflector. However, Harbers et al. indicate that truncation is expected to increase the beam angle. Another approach proposed in Harbers et al. is to design the color-mixing cavity to be partially forward-collimating through the use of a pyramidal or dome-shaped central reflector. However, this approach can compromise color-mixing and hence the CRI characteristics, and also may adversely affect optical coupling with the compound parabolic concentrator, since the number of times that each light ray bounces on the side wall and becomes mixed in color and in spatial distribution is greatly reduced.